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Symptoms drive health care utilization. Therefore, health care costs are reduced by reducing musculoskeletal injuries through job redesign, ergonomics, or changes in work scheduling.

The authors examined the impact of a number of job stressors, including sexual harassment and gender-based discrimination, on female construction workers' level of job satisfaction and psychological and physical health. Results from a telephone survey with 211 female laborers indicated that having responsibility for others' safety and having support from supervisors and male coworkers was related to greater job satisfaction. Increased reported psychological symptoms were also related to increased responsibility, as well as skill underutilization, experiencing sexual harassment and gender-based discrimination from supervisors and coworkers, and having to overcompensate at work. Perceptions of overcompensation at work and job uncertainty were positively associated with self-reports of insomnia. Finally, sexual harassment and gender discrimination were positively related to reports of increased nausea and headaches.

Work-related musculoskeletal disorders (WRMDs) are increasingly becoming more prevalent in the US workforce. The introduction of computer-based technology seems to have been accompanied by an increase in WRMDs. Computer-based technology seems to intensify work so much as to create stressful and unhealthy working conditions. In this paper, the role and impact of various psychosocial work stressors, including teamwork, in work organization interventions aimed at reducing and/or preventing WRMDs among office/computer workers are examined. Both the process and the content of the work organization interventions rely on teamwork. The results show the importance of teamwork in influencing stress and musculoskeletal discomfort. In particular, the psychosocial factors of open group process and group cohesiveness were among the most important predictors of anxiety and musculoskeletal discomfort. The results show that teamwork affects both psychosocial stress outcomes (anxiety) as well as musculoskeletal discomfort. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]